The Cossacks

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The Cossacks
Linda Pastan
2002

Introduction
Author Biography
Poem Summary
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
Further Reading

Introduction

Linda Pastan's poem "The Cossacks" appears in her 2002 collection titled The Last Uncle. Although Pastan is generally associated with poetry related to domesticity and personal experience, her later poetry often considers themes of aging, mortality, and the reality of death. "The Cossacks" contains these themes, but the poem is somewhat unusual in her canon of work because it is presented as a poem about her Jewish heritage. In the poem, she gives voice to what she describes as an aspect of Jewish thinking. She describes the tendency to focus on the negative or to assume that the worst is ahead, admitting a fear and deep pessimism in her own thinking. In contrast, her mother and F. (to whom the poem is dedicated) handle crises with serenity. Pastan touches on the theme of social masks to explain the difference between the two figures facing their own mortality; her mother pretended to be calm, but F. was genuinely calm. Ultimately, the speaker longs for the latter, but her own nature resists it.

Historically, the Cossacks to whom Pastan refers were groups of mercenaries who lived along the Russian border. Cossacks first appeared as a people in the fifteenth century, in the form of loosely organized, but related communities. By the sixteenth century, these groups had coalesced into two major groupings, one in the Ukraine and the other on the river Don bordering the Grand Duchy of Moscow. In the late nineteenth century, the Cossack men who served the czar had become active in suppressing rebellion and massacring Jews. Because of their violence and aggression toward Jews, Pastan uses them as figures of hostility and danger in "The Cossacks." The poem opens with the statement that they are always coming, and it ends with the sound of horses approaching, which the reader can imagine are those of the Cossacks. It is an effective image that infuses the poem with a sense of impending danger. Pastan is known for her affinity for metaphor and imagery, and both of those devices are in full force in this poem. The danger associated with the Cossacks is brought to life with imagery, but the Cossacks are actually a metaphor for death.

Author Biography

Linda Olenik Pastan was born on May 27, 1932, in New York City. Her interest in writing poetry emerged when she was only ten or eleven years old, but she did not anticipate pursuing a career as a writer. In 1953, she married Ira Pastan, a molecular biologist, and the couple had two sons and a daughter. Pastan graduated in 1954 with a bachelor of arts from Radcliffe College. In 1955, she earned a master of library science from Simmons College, and in 1957 she received a master of arts from Brandeis University. Although she did not study writing formally, she continued to work at it and to seek improvement of her writing skills. She won the first of many poetry awards in 1958, when at age twenty-six she received the Mademoiselle Dylan Thomas Poetry Award. The noted American poet Sylvia Plath came in second. Among Pastan's other awards and honors are a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1972), a Bread Loaf Writers Conference fellowship (1974), the Poetry Society of America's De Castagnola Award (1978), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2003), and a Pushcart Prize. She held the position of poet laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995. Her first book, A Perfect Circle of Sun, was published in 1971. From 1971 to 2005, she published fourteen more volumes. Two of her books, PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1983) and Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968–1998 (1998), were nominated for the National Book Award. Pastan's 2002 collection, The Last Uncle, contains the poem "The Cossacks."

Despite her interest in and talent for writing poetry and the early recognition of her work, Pastan set aside any career ambitions to fulfill her roles as a wife and mother, accepting the traditional duties of housekeeper consistent with the expectations of women in the 1950s. Still, her poetic voice remained active, and Pastan wrote poetry about domesticity, motherhood, children, seasons, and marital struggle. She is known for her spare and accessible style, and she often introduces metaphors and imagery that add depth to her treatment of her subjects. Although Pastan's themes generally center on domestic life and on her personal experiences, her poetry explores family relationships, maternal musings, and domestic frustration without becoming overly emotional or sentimental. While Pastan writes about the balance of power and dependence in marriage, she does so without a feminist agenda. In her early poetry, she presents an honest portrayal of her domestic life, defending it as difficult and challenging. In her later poetry, Pastan focuses on the themes of aging and mortality. Her poetry has been compared to that of Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. Such comparisons point to her strong poetic voice, her consistent vision, and her distinctly American point of view.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.]

Poem Summary

Lines 1-5

"The Cossacks" is composed of five five-line stanzas (cinquains) written in free verse, or verse without a set rhyme pattern or meter. The first stanza opens with the statement that to Jews, hostility and danger are always around the corner. The speaker asserts that "the Cossacks are always coming," referring to the mercenary group that massacred Russian Jews in the nineteenth century. She generalizes her own fear and pessimism by claiming that her mind-set is common among Jews. Because of that tendency to assume the worst, she assumes that a spot on her arm is cancer. Also because of that tendency, she spends the last evening before the new year listing everyone who has died in that year, rather than reflecting on the promise and excitement of what is ahead of her. This first stanza introduces the themes of pessimism and death. The speaker's backward thinking is evident in Pastan's use of oxymoron when she writes that she "celebrate[s]" by "counting / my annual dead."

Lines 6-10

In the second stanza, the speaker recalls her mother's final days. Knowing that she was going to die, her mother entertained visitors with small talk. Pastan paints a picture of social awkwardness through the image of visitors coming to see a dying woman, perhaps to say their last good-byes and ask if they can do anything at all to give her peace and instead finding themselves engaged in talk about books and past travels. The speaker interprets her mother's behavior as showing "serenity" and "manners." She suspects, however, that her mother was just pretending to be serene and was looking for security in artificial manners rather than choosing to be genuine and honest with her visitors. Because the speaker knew her mother so well, she says that she "could tell the difference."

Lines 11-15

The third stanza opens with a telling "But," which indicates a turn in the speaker's thought process. In this stanza, she recalls the way someone else handles herself in the face of her own mortality. Interestingly, the speaker addresses this person directly, even though the poem indicates that the person has died. The speaker does not give a name or relationship, referring to the person only as F., to whom the poem is dedicated. What is striking to the speaker is how F. conducted herself, planning for the future despite her knowledge that she had no future. She remained optimistic and hopeful to the very end, but with calm instead of desperation. When the speaker says, "I couldn't explain / your genuine smile in the face / of disaster," she reveals the fundamental difference between herself and F. While F. has a genuine smile, the speaker sees only the disaster. Clearly, F. did not view her situation as one of disaster. The stanza ends with an incomplete question that is finished in the next stanza. This break suggests a pause in the speaker's thinking. She ends one stanza with "Was it denial" (her first assumption), and begins the next with "laced with acceptance?" (her thoughtful conclusion).

Lines 16-20

The fourth stanza explores more deeply the theme of social masks. The speaker wonders whether F.'s ability to remain peaceful can be attributed to her English heritage, with the idea that the English are very reserved. Pastan draws in a literary allusion to Charlotte Brontë's novel Villette, in which a young woman, Lucy, hides her strong emotions. Pastan reinforces the theme of social masks in the contrast she sets up between the emotional "fire" and the "dun-colored dress." The brightness of Lucy's emotions remains completely hidden by the dull neutrality of her outer appearance. Similarly, the speaker wonders whether F.'s emotional turmoil was hidden by a calm appearance.

Lines 21-25

As is evident in the final stanza, the speaker concludes that F.'s peaceful countenance was genuine. The speaker tells F., "I want to live the way you did," meaning that she wants to find a way to be genuinely optimistic and peaceful about whatever happens in her life. She likens F. in her final days to someone who disregards next year's famine and lays out a lavish banquet of food and wine. The speaker, however, cannot change her nature. Even as she describes the banquet, she is interrupted by the perception of hearing the Cossacks coming. In the last two lines, she writes, "But listen: those are hoofbeats / on the frosty autumn air." Again, the poem turns on the word "but," and the tone changes completely. The hoofbeats might be those of the Cossacks' horses, indicating that the speaker is unable to surrender fully to the fantasy of living as F. lived. The danger, real or perceived, is always a few steps behind her.

Themes

Pessimism

The speaker in "The Cossacks" is a pessimistic person, a fact she reveals in the first stanza. The first line describes her feeling that demise is always on the way. While she makes this statement as a comment about the Jewish community from which she comes, the poem is really about her own feeling that the worst awaits her. Perhaps she feels comfort or justification in her feelings by being part of a collective mind-set, which is why she claims that her pessimism is part of her culture. Regardless of why she feels the way she does, her grim outlook on life shapes her experience of life. Most of the first stanza describes that experience; she assumes that a spot on her own arm is the beginning of cancer, and she chooses to spend New Year's Eve totaling up the people who died that year instead of planning for a wonderful new year ahead. Thoughts of death pervade her thinking, and she sees death as a menacing and violent hunter.

The speaker's pessimism also shapes the way she sees other people. In the second stanza, she discusses her mother's final days as death approached. Because she knew her mother so well, she feels confident in saying that the manners her mother exhibited to visitors were merely covering her real feelings. In the third stanza, she wonders whether her friend adopted the same strategy. She wonders whether her friend's serenity in her final days was denial or repressed feelings. Because the speaker holds such a pessimistic view of death, she interprets other people's experience through that lens. Even at the end of the poem, when she claims to want to embrace optimism and hope, she cannot help but feel the impending doom of death.

Social Masks

In describing her mother's death, the speaker recalls visitors coming and being greeted by superficial chat about books and vacation destinations. The speaker says her mother displayed "serenity / as a form of manners." Rather than engage visitors in meaningful ways that might give them closure and peace, her mother prefers the safety of small talk. She does not want to show the emotions—fear, regret, uncertainty, or sadness—that would be expected at such a time. What is particularly interesting about her mother is that she has nothing to lose in being honest with her friends and family at this time. She is facing death, so there would be no consequences of sharing her true feelings with them, yet she chooses to remain confined within the comfort and familiarity of idle chat. Her social mask seems to be such a part of her personality that, even in her final hours, she cannot remove it.

In contrast, F. has no use for a social mask because, in her final hours, she has genuine peace. She makes plans for a future that will include her, perhaps for the benefit of those who will carry on without her. F. chooses to spend her time engaged in something meaningful, even if her plans will not be fulfilled. Perhaps F. is playing out important "what if" scenarios, or perhaps she is letting her friends and family know that she expects them to continue living satisfying lives without her. Whatever her reasons, she occupies her final days with something more meaningful than shallow discussions of books and travel, as the speaker's mother chose to do. The speaker can tell the difference between her mother and F., even though they both show serenity in their times of crises. The reader can assume that the speaker has this insight because she, too, struggles with her own social mask, but her awareness of it (as evident in the poem) indicates her desire to live without it.

Topics For Further Study

In "The Cossacks," Pastan uses Cossacks as an effective metaphor for death. What would you choose as a metaphor for death? Think of something that is specific to your experience, background, or feelings so that the metaphor will be uniquely yours. Write a poem developing your metaphor.
In "The Cossacks," the speaker refers to denial and acceptance, two of the five stages of grief. One of Pastan's previous collections, The Five Stages of Grief (1978), is arranged to parallel the five stages of grief described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying. Research On Death and Dying or Kübler-Ross's On Grief and Grieving to better understand the five stages a person goes through when faced with death. Take into account not just the person who is dying but also the loved ones who are preparing for their own loss. Write an essay about what you have learned.
Everyone has worn a social mask at some time, whether to get through a life-and-death crisis, to deal with peer pressure, or to fulfill someone else's set of expectations. Recall a time when you felt it necessary to wear a social mask. Write a brief script in which you retell the experience of that time, putting your true thoughts and feelings in italics or as asides in parentheses to the audience.
Based on your reading and interpretation of "The Cossacks," how do you think the speaker will handle her own death when her time comes? In the poem, her feelings are conflicted as she struggles against her own nature. Do you think she will be like her mother, like F., or different from both of them? Lead a group discussion on the topic, and be sure to support your arguments with excerpts from the poem.
Find a plot summary and character profile for Charlotte Brontë's novel Villette. Which of the three women in "The Cossacks" (the mother, F., or the speaker) do you think is most like Brontë's Lucy? Which do you think is least like her? Is there any commonality among the four? Write up your conclusions in an essay, or create a chart or poster showing the similarities and differences you have found among the characters.

Style

Metaphor

Known for her use of metaphor, Pastan uses powerful images in "The Cossacks" to portray death. The dominant metaphor in the poem is the representation of the Cossacks as death itself. It is a particularly strong metaphor because it reveals precisely how the speaker views death. Death has been portrayed in numerous ways by poets, and while others may see it variously as a peaceful figure, a welcome figure, or even a worthy adversary, Pastan's speaker views death as a ruthless mercenary who actively pursues her. Because Pastan refers to her own Judaic background in the first line, the image of the Cossacks adds an element of terror. The Cossacks massacred Russian Jews in the nineteenth century, so they represent cruelty and persecution to Pastan and her speaker. In the first line, the speaker states, "For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming." She immediately describes assuming that she has melanoma and her activity of counting the dead. Both of these are, in the speaker's mind, examples of the Cossacks who are coming or have already come. Pastan brings the poem full circle when, in the last two lines, she writes, "But listen: those are hoofbeats / on the frosty autumn air." This essentially restates the first line and gives the metaphor another level of panic. By demanding that the reader listen and feel the cold air, using the senses to reinforce the metaphor, Pastan adds drama to the reader's experience of the poem. The final lines have an ominous feel, and the speaker seems to be warning the reader against deadly danger.

In the last stanza, Pastan introduces another metaphor in which she describes death as an imminent famine. She admires F. for the way she planned for the famine by having a sumptuous banquet, complete with wine and music. It is an image of celebration and carefree delight, rather than sorrow and dread. The metaphor of death as a famine is effective, as it portrays the nothingness of death and the emptiness felt by the surviving loved ones. The counterbalance of that metaphor with one of a banquet gives the reader a concise illustration of F.'s response to the realization of her own death. She chose to live fully the rest of the time she had left, and that is what the speaker struggles to be able to do.

Symbolism

Just as Pastan uses imagery to reinforce metaphor, she uses imagery to give dimension to symbolism in "The Cossacks." The dark spot on her skin brings the speaker to assume that she has cancer, which provides important insight into the speaker's thinking. These spots, made by the sun, stand for the everyday occurrences that seem harmless to many people but represent death to the speaker. When her mother lies dying, she speaks of "books / and travel" with her visitors. Books symbolize secondhand knowledge or escapist experience, and travel represents firsthand knowledge through experience. In her final days, the mother discusses on a superficial level things that are knowable, rather than revealing her emotions or sharing reflections on her life. In the fourth stanza, Pastan alludes to Charlotte Brontë's novel Villette and the main character, Lucy, who could control the expression of her own strong feelings. Lucy makes the choice to wear a social mask and to control feelings rather than be controlled by feelings, and her character represents this choice. Pastan ends her poem with a line rich in symbolism. She writes that the "hoofbeats / on the frosty autumn air" can be heard. Cold often signifies harshness and lack of emotion, and autumn is highly symbolic as a season when living things lose their color and lushness and seem to die.

Historical Context

Jewish American Literature

The field of Jewish American literature as an area of academic study began to take shape in the twentieth century. Literary scholars who study the work of Jewish writers have focused more on the careers of playwrights such as Arthur Miller and novelists such as J. D. Salinger (whose father was Jewish), Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. To a more limited extent, poets (most notably, Allen Ginsberg and Karl Shapiro) have received a degree of critical and scholarly attention in this field. There is no doubt that the contributions of Jewish writers have shaped American literature in important ways. Among the best-known writers are Woody Allen, Isaac Asimov, Paul Auster, Judy Blume, Betty Friedan, Joseph Heller, E. L. Doctorow, and Harold Bloom.

Many scholars of Jewish American literature examine questions of Jewish identity as it pertains to living in America and look at the ways in which the long-standing traditions of the faith and culture survive in this country. As the field grows, scholars are also exploring such aspects of the culture as linguistics, religion, politics, and social issues. In looking at the works of Jewish writers across genres and circumstances, scholars note certain themes that seem to characterize this body of work, including violence, intergenerational struggle, and guilt.

Cossacks

Derived from the Turkic word kazak, the word Cossack means "free-booter" or "vagabond." The original Cossacks formed settlements in the Don region of Russia during the fifteenth century as groups of mercenaries and fugitives looking for a place to escape the reach of authority. The largest group was always the Don Cossacks, but other groups (Zaporozhian Cossacks, Terek Cossacks, and others) formed as well. Most of the Cossacks were of Russian descent, with some having Turkic or Kalmyk roots.

Although the Cossacks retained territorial and political autonomy, they eventually forged a relationship with the Russian government to act as a military group in exchange for needed goods and money. In this capacity, they helped defend the Russian border and carry out various military objectives. During the seventeenth century, the government tried to tighten control and even asked that fugitives be returned. The Cossacks saw these attempts to assert authority over them as an affront. This event put distance in the relationship between the government and the Cossacks until 1738, when the Don Cossacks' chief commander was no longer elected but was appointed by the Russian government. This led to a series of events that ultimately resulted in the Cossacks' becoming part of the Russian military proper. By the turn of the century, Cossacks had equal military ranking within the Russian army. Military service was a way of life; enlisted Cossacks served a thirty-year term until 1875, when the term was reduced to twenty years. Young Cossack men were sworn into service as a group, and discipline was harsh.

The Cossacks were notorious for their willingness to wield power to its fullest extent. The Russian government assigned them to crush rebellion and slaughter Jews during pogroms. Fifty-seven regiments served in World War I, but the twentieth century saw the relationship between the government and the Cossacks deteriorate. By World War II, they were outdated and disbanded.

As a people, the Cossacks were rugged and strict. They originally supported themselves through fishing, hunting, animal husbandry, and collecting loot from their raids. Their relationship with the government enabled them to earn cash, grain, liquor, and weaponry. In the eighteenth century, they added agriculture to their economy. While their religion was Russian Orthodoxy, they incorporated folklore and superstition into religious tradition. Military heroics were very important to the Cossacks, and they kept the stories of heroism alive through the oral tradition. When they celebrated with singing and dancing, they usually sang about battles.

Critical Overview

Over the course of her lengthy career, which began in the late 1950s, Pastan has earned a loyal following of readers and critics alike. For her exalting of domestic subjects and her spare style, she has been compared to Emily Dickinson. For her appreciation of nature, its character, and its relationship to people, she has been compared to Walt Whitman. And for her psychological insights, she has been compared to Edgar Allan Poe. In Contemporary Poets, Jay S. Paul remarks, "Like Poe, Pastan has been conscious of the limits of the mind and the impossibility of exceeding them." Paul also notes that Pastan's perspective is of someone who is very aware of her own human fallibility. He writes that she "has long seen herself as Eve—one of the fallen." Paul praises the fact that Pastan's "vision has been consistent throughout her books." In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Benjamin Franklin V notes that Pastan's "ability to create memorable images and her penchant for examining life's unpleasant emotions" have been characteristic of her poetry since her first collection, A Perfect Circle of Sun. When Pastan won the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most lucrative prizes awarded to American poets, the staff of Poetry extended its congratulations to her, "thanking her for her consistently excellent contributions to American poetry over four decades."

Critics praise The Last Uncle, in which "The Cossacks" appears. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commends her "fluent, accessible lyric seriousness, finding in seasonal and domestic properties … signs of mortality, gratitude, and wonder." Library Journal's Louis McKee writes, "Pastan has done a good job of turning our attention to what really matters … Pastan's poems are always worthy of our attention." The themes portrayed in "The Cossacks" are among those that critics have long appreciated in Pastan's work. Franklin comments, "Pastan frequently observes that pleasing exteriors conceal death's roots," a prevailing message in "The Cossacks." In his concluding comments on Pastan's career, Franklin writes, "Pastan deserves serious attention for her finely wrought dark comments on the human condition. Not spectacular, she is a solid poet whose work speaks to all of mankind. Her verse will endure."

Criticism

Jennifer Bussey

Bussey is an independent writer specializing in literature. In the following essay, she discusses Pastan's poem "The Cossacks" with emphasis on the speaker's preoccupation with death.

Pastan's poem "The Cossacks" conveys images of mercenaries, small talk, manners, final days, strong emotions, a plain dress, a banquet, and a crisp autumn day. It is evidence of Pastan's skill as a poet that these wide-ranging images and ideas converge to give unified insight into the speaker's preoccupation with death. The speaker sees death not as the peaceful and inevitable end of a person's life but as a cruel enemy constantly on the hunt for her. Because the speaker's voice has such depth and is so well developed, the various images form a unified message of fear. In less accomplished hands, such differing thoughts and images would result in confusion, but in Pastan's hands, each line creates a voice that is consistent, believable, and sympathy-evoking. In fact, the voice is so consistent that even when the speaker tries to embrace a new way of relating to death, her deep-seated fear resurfaces.

The speaker addresses F. (to whom the poem is dedicated) directly, as if she were still alive, yet the reader knows by the end of the poem that F. has died. So, from the beginning of the poem, the speaker is grappling with death; she is addressing someone she has already grieved. Perhaps this expression as poetry is part of her grieving process. Her motivation for expressing these thoughts is never made clear, nor is it at all apparent how much time has passed since she lost F. The speaker's matter-of-fact tone indicates that she has gone through the most immediate, painful stages of grief, so it is reasonable to assume that she has arrived at a point where she can analyze F.'s death. It is clear from the progression of the poem that the speaker wants to learn from F.'s graceful acceptance of death. She does not understand F.'s fearless and peaceful response to what she herself sees as terror and tragedy, but she sees clearly enough to understand that she wants to change this aspect of herself. She wants to be able to disarm death with a genuine smile, as F. did.

The speaker opens the poem with an ominous statement: "For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming." The Cossacks the speaker refers to were a military group of Russian mercenaries who asserted their power by putting down rebellion, massacring Jews, and carrying out other acts of extreme force. Given the history of the Cossacks and the Jews, the poem's opening statement reveals the speaker's sense of powerlessness and terror. It soon becomes apparent that the Cossacks are a metaphor for death, which makes the first line even more revealing. The speaker feels that she is constantly being sought by death, and she sees death as an active force that is cruel and emotionless. While the speaker claims that Jews in general are treated this way by death, or at least feel that they are, what is really at stake in the poem is the speaker's individual preoccupation. She might not need to question her preoccupation if she can convince herself that it is merely a cultural inheritance, but regardless of its origins it haunts her.

By the second line, the speaker is talking about herself directly. Her preoccupation with death is evident in that she mentions death on every other line of the first stanza. "Cossacks" refers to death itself, "melanoma" refers to a possible carrier of death, and "annual dead" refers to those who have already succumbed to death in the preceding year. In the speaker's mind, death is all around her. It is as far away as the spirits of those who have died, and it is as near as her own arm. The speaker's twisted thinking about death is expressed in the oxymoron of celebrating a holiday by counting how many people she knows who have died over the course of the preceding year. Either she means this sarcastically, or she means it as celebration of the fact that they were the ones who died, not her.

In the second stanza, the speaker recalls the way her mother handled her crisis of death and contrasts it with the way F. did. Both women knew they were dying, and both seemed to accept death with grace and serenity. Because the speaker was close to both of them, however, she knows that the truths of the two women were very different. She knows that her mother only pretended to be peaceful and accepting, preferring manners and niceties to moments of intensity and honesty with the people she loved. Her mother seems to have chosen to behave according to a code of manners as much for the comfort of her visitors as for herself. The reader cannot help but wonder, however, whether the visitors would not have preferred to connect at a deeper level than the speaker's mother allowed. In her mother, the speaker sees the same fear she herself feels. Why would her mother put on such an artificial countenance if the truth were not too terrifying to accept? The speaker sees through her mother's act, but she does not judge her for it.

In contrast to her mother, the speaker recalls, in the third stanza, the genuine peacefulness that F. displayed during her time of crisis. She remembers watching F. plan for a future that would never come and embrace life fully to the very end. The speaker admits that this response to death confused her: "I couldn't explain / your genuine smile in the face / of disaster." Her lack of understanding derives from the fact that "disaster" is in the eye of the beholder. The speaker sees everything related to death as the ultimate disaster, but F. clearly did not see it in the same way. Although it was F.'s death, it was actually the speaker's disaster. This is why she could not explain the genuine smile or the planning for the future. The speaker cannot help but wonder if the smile might not have been an outward sign of some kind of denial, but, as she moves into the fourth stanza, she entertains the idea that F. may have reached acceptance. When she wonders whether F. was actually hiding strong feelings, like Lucy in Charlotte Brontë's Villette, she knows better. What is unsaid is that the social mask she remembers from Villette is actually the type worn by her mother.

The speaker seems to have a sense that people understand crisis as their ancestors did. She aligns her fear of death with her Judaism, and in the fourth stanza she considers F.'s controlled emotion as a possible result of her "generations of being English." This provides an important insight into the speaker, because it suggests that she does not feel responsible for her own feelings about death but believes that they are an inescapable part of her culture. She clearly feels a strong connection to her heritage, but in the fifth stanza, she seems prepared to forge her own path.

In the fifth and last stanza, the speaker decides that she would rather face death as F. did rather than as her own mother did. This will not be an easy task, given that the speaker identifies with her mother's fear of death so readily. She has a high level of self-knowledge that includes cultural self-knowledge, but she wants to choose better for herself so that she can approach death with contentment and genuine serenity. She sees death as an inevitable famine (another disaster image), but she deeply admires the way F. disregarded disaster and held the metaphorical equivalent of a lavish banquet. This is an actual celebratory image that overpowers the false celebration of New Year's Eve in the first stanza. The banquet is almost tangible to the speaker; she can see that there is wine, music, and ten courses. It is an inviting image in which the speaker longs to participate. But equally tangible to her is the threatening sound of hoofbeats. Are these the Cossacks approaching? The thumping of the hoofbeats could very well be the speaker's own heartbeat quickening again at the thought of actually facing death. She knows death is coming, and her pessimism drives her to assume that it is coming soon. She is not prepared for it, and she is not ready to accept or embrace it. This is a pivotal moment for the speaker. Her conflict has peaked. She has to choose whether to surrender to her own nature and continue to live in fear, looking over her shoulder for death, or to fight her nature, assert her will, and strive to be like F. The poem ends here, and Pastan leaves the reader to speculate on the speaker's choice.

Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on "The Cossacks," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Louis McKee

In the following review, McKee notes Pastan's focus in these poems on time and passages, especially aging, loss, and death.

"The pills I take to postpone death/are killing me," writes Pastan in her new collection of poems, her 11th in about 35 years. Here she deals with loss, with death and other passings, and with the often curious journey through the stages of aging. However, in these careful, insightful considerations of time and its occasional rough edges, the poet finds much to celebrate: the hard-won beauty of her son's piano playing; the "love and/disobedience" of her dog, who is given to sit regardless of the command; a tree surrounded by "a dozen monarchs/and swallowtails … as if they were/its second crop of blossoms." These are the things to remember, to praise: a branch outside the window, soon to be kindling; an old car going to rust; "the 8th dog of my life;/the 10th scribbled book/And love turning its back on endings/one more time." Pastan has done a good job of turning our attention to what really matters. "If death is everywhere we look,/at least let's marry it to beauty." Pastan's poems are always worth our attention.

Source: Louis McKee, Review of The Last Uncle, in Library Journal, Vol. 127, No. 2, February 1, 2002, p. 106.

Linda Pastan and Ken Adelman

In the following interview, Pastan discusses what she has learned as a poet and, in turn, what she can impart to others. She notes that poetry is more about "emotional experience" than "knowledge."

Above her desk, poet Linda Pastan has posted a quote from Tennessee Williams: "The only honor you can confer upon a writer is a good morning's work."

Pastan is one of the lucky poets for whom many good mornings' work have yielded tangible honors, including nine published books, the Dylan Thomas Award, the Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a recent four-year stint as Maryland's poet laureate. The Gettysburg Review said of her latest book, An Early Afterlife, that it "reaffirms her place among the finest contemporary poets in America."

Born in New York City, Pastan began submitting poems to the New Yorker at the age of 12. (The magazine did not publish its first Pastan poem until almost 30 years later.) She graduated from Radcliffe and later received a master's degree in English literature from Brandeis.

After a ten-year break to raise her three children, she resumed writing. Her poems soon began appearing in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and the Georgia Review. She has read her works at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, and other institutions.

Pastan lives with her husband, Ira, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the National Cancer Institute. They have three grown children: Stephen, a nephrologist with Emory Medical School in Atlanta; Peter, a chef who owns two restaurants, Obelisk and Pizzeria Paradiso, in downtown DC; and Rachel, who writes fiction in Madison, Wisconsin.

It was in the study of her Potomac home, filled with books and with a vista of the surrounding forest, that we discussed what she's learned.

[Ken Adelman:] What does one do as poet laureate of Maryland?

[Linda Pastan:] Six years ago, someone in the governor's office approached me about becoming poet laureate and asked if I'd be willing to write poems for state occasions. "Absolutely not," I replied. "You'll have to find somebody else." Then she asked what I would be willing to do if I took the post. I said I'd be happy to read poems and talk about poetry to people around Maryland who usually had no contact with poetry or poets. I'd like to help those who think they don't know anything about poetry, and are therefore afraid of it, learn that there isn't that much to "know."

Not much to know about poetry?

No. Poetry is not a matter of knowledge but of emotional experience. It's there to be enjoyed, to be used for celebration and for consolation. I find that people ask me if they can use a certain poem of mine for a funeral or a wedding. They sense they need poetry in their lives, especially on these important occasions, but they don't always know how to find it.

So, as poet laureate, I traveled around the state a lot, to a prison, an old-age home, hospitals, schools, talking to people about poetry and reading some of my own poems aloud to them.

Do you read your poems differently than other people do?

Yes. Every writer has a unique way of viewing his or her own work, and that comes out in the way she reads it aloud. I go to many public readings by poets I like, mainly to hear their voices. Then, when I read their poems to myself, I can still hear that voice in my head.

Should a reader care what you intended to put in a poem?

What Do I Read Next?

Edited by Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf, American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present (2000) profiles thirteen hundred writers spanning the full history of the United States and including all genres.
Edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism (1993) gives readers the best of Rich's poetry and essays. Although Rich's background is very similar to Pastan's and both women are respected writers, their bodies of work are very different.
Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems: Volume Two (2005) is hailed as a fitting companion to Oliver's National Book Award-winning first volume. Here, she offers her readers the Robert Frost-like poetry they have come to love, coupled with the perspective of wisdom and age.
Pastan's first book of poetry, A Perfect Circle of Sun (1971), takes the reader through a different season in each of the four sections of the book. Pastan is concerned less with commenting on how the seasons relate to nature and more on how they affect people's feelings and experiences.
Nominated for the National Book Award, Pastan's PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (1982) prompted many critics to comment on how she had matured as a poet. These poems reflect the passing of a day from the morning to the night, with special attention to poems drawn from dream fragments.
In the nineteenth-century novel The Cossacks (originally published in 1862), the master Russian writer Leo Tolstoy tells a story about a young aristocrat, Dmitri Olenin, and his quest for happiness and purpose. When he joins the military, he falls in love with a Cossack girl who is betrothed to a fierce Cossack soldier.

Only to some degree. All readers bring to each poem their own experiences and emotions and interpret and enjoy the poem in their own ways. Personally, I am interested in knowing a writer's specific intent, but only later and more professionally—that is, from a craft point of view.

Suppose I can find different meaning in your poem than you intended?

That does happen, and it's all right with me, at least up to a point. I mean, if you come to an opposite conclusion—if I were praising something you thought I was denigrating—that would upset me. I certainly don't want to be completely misconstrued.

But if you find meanings in one of my poems that I hadn't realized were there, that would be fine. I've often learned about my own work from hearing other peoples' interpretations of it. There can be things that perhaps I knew in my subconscious that I hadn't realized I knew and that someone else helped me to see.

For instance, the title poem of my first book, A Perfect Circle of Sun, has a layer of meaning I hadn't consciously intended. In that poem I described the experience of looking at the world through a skylight. In fact, the poem is called "Skylight." Some critic wrote that the poem was really about looking at the world through the lens of poetry. Once I read that I thought, "Yes. That really is one of the things the poem is about." I must have known it on some level but hadn't known I knew it. And that's good. Because though writing poetry certainly doesn't bring you fame or fortune, it can bring you—as William Stafford, a poet I very much loved and admired, pointed out—a way of discovering things you didn't know you knew. And so the act of writing a poem can become an act of exploration and discovery.

Why did you choose poetry over fiction?

It seems to me that most writers have an impulse to expand or to condense language and experience, and in general the first path leads to fiction, the other to poetry. Of course there are some poets like Walt Whitman who are very expansive and some fiction writers who write small, jewel-like stories. And a few writers, like Thomas Hardy or, in our time, Margaret Atwood, can do both well. But my impulse to condense is very strong.

What drove you into poetry?

I've always written, at least I have from the time I was 12 or 13. As an only child, books were my main companions, and writing became my way of talking to the characters in those books and to the authors of those poems. But I stopped writing after I got married and started having children. That was in the '50s, and I didn't think, then, that I could be the right kind of wife and mother and keep pursuing something as important to me as poetry always has been. I think now that I was wrong. And a young woman probably wouldn't make that mistake today. Anyway, when I returned to writing, almost ten years later, I did try a novel, but I soon found I wasn't interested in the plot or the characters. I was interested in the descriptive passages, and particularly in the metaphoric language. And my novel kept getting shorter and shorter, becoming almost a short story. Before long I realized that what it really wanted was to become a poem.

Your poems deal with nature and art.

Whatever is in my life seems to end up in my poems. I do go to a lot of museums and galleries, and some of my poems are about what I see there. And living here in the middle of the woods, I watch the leaves changing and the snow falling, and I write about that too. But I don't consider myself primarily a nature poet. I use the natural world for metaphoric material rather than trying to simply describe it.

Do you need a burst of creativity to write a poem?

No; there aren't that many bursts. If I waited to be inspired, I'd write maybe one or two poems a year.

But I make myself sit at my desk each morning, whether I feel like it or not, and when I get bored enough, I always start writing something. Inspiration, I find, can be coaxed. And if things get really desperate, I do allow myself to read other people's poems, and that may get me started, may trigger my own imagination.

It's always the getting started that's so hard. I often wish I were a novelist so I could work on one thing for three or four years at a time, but a poet has to keep starting from scratch, over and over again. I finish one or two poems a month, if I'm lucky.

Do you revise a lot?

Oh yes. One of my poems, "The Myth of Perfectibility," even deals with revision as a subject. In it I try to say that a poet must be in love with revision in order to write. The original ideas and metaphors may take only a few hours to get on paper. Then the revision may take a couple of months, years even. I go through maybe 100 revisions for nearly every poem.

Do you finally say, "That's it. I've had it!"

Sure, I say that. But I don't necessarily stick to it. Between a poem's publication in a magazine and later in a book, I often make changes. Then when I put together a collection of selected poems from various books, as I'm doing again now, I may change a few more things, particularly titles. It's called fear of closure, I guess.

In my latest book I have a poem called "Vermilion." It's about the painter Pierre Bonnard, who would never feel that his paintings were finished. He'd even walk into museums where his pictures were hanging and take a paintbrush to them there. In my poem I try to show how life, as well as art, entails constant revision. The poem ends: "As if revision were the purest form of love," and I think it is.

What's your advice to a young poet?

Read, read, read! Revise, revise, revise!

What's the purpose of poetry?

For the writer it's an act of discovery and of letting out, and onto the page, what's deep within. It doesn't cure the pain of feelings but it expresses it through intense language, and if the poet gets it right, it can help the reader to see the world in new ways. To me all poetry is, in a sense, political. Evil acts generally grow out of a failure of imagination, and poetry, by exercising the imagination as if it were a muscle, can ultimately help influence decisions made out in the real world.

Is judging poetry subjective?

To some degree, yes. It is usually clear when poetry is really bad, but it is harder to agree on what's really good.

After time, though, a few poets are still read and most are forgotten.

I guess so. But many are forgotten because of accident or bad luck. The great poems handed down to us usually are great, but I bet there are a lot of wonderful poems we've never had the chance to see or hear.

How do you deal with rejection?

Quite well, actually. That's probably because I started writing poems seriously when I was in my thirties and isolated from any writing community. I didn't know even one other writer. So for me, sending out my poems and getting them back was exciting. I liked the action. A note from an editor, even a form rejection slip, made me feel as if something more were happening in my life than just changing diapers.

In any case, all poets get rejected, even the most famous and honored. I tell young poets one trick I've learned. For each group of poems you send out, have an envelope ready on your desk to resubmit those poems. Then, when they come back, don't leave them sitting around on your desk; send them right back out into the world.

Do you learn from other poets?

I certainly try to. In fact I can't read poems anymore simply for pleasure, the way I read fiction. I always feel I have to try to learn something.

What have you learned?

Different things from different poets. From William Stafford I learned to trust myself, to start quietly and be willing to stay quiet within the poem. From Charles Simic I learned to try strange and daring metaphors. From Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath, I learned that no subject matter was really off limits. That lesson was very liberating, especially when I first began writing poems again.

Is your poetry autobiographical?

Some of it is, but only up to a point. I think of the "I" in my poems as my fraternal, not identical twin. And though I may use my own children's names, for instances, I am inventing some of what I have them do or say. I am after emotional truth, not literal fact.

How should an amateur begin to read poetry?

Don't be afraid. Don't think about what the poem "means." Read it for the joy of language and for the way it moves you. Later you can go back and read it again and perhaps find new things in it you didn't notice right away. Too many people have had poetry ruined for them in school by bad teachers. Read a poem for pleasure, and if it's a really good poem, it will draw you back again and again.

How does a poet make a living?

A poet doesn't make a living. Most poets I know teach, since that leaves them some time at least for their own writing. But poets have supported themselves many ways—for instance, Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive, and William Carlos Williams was a doctor.

What have you learned from writing poetry?

I've learned more about myself than I would have known otherwise, since writing is such an introspective act. To do it well, you must examine your deepest feelings honestly and somehow articulate them on the page.

I've also learned that my family is the most important thing to me and will always come first. If one of my kids was in a play and I was invited to something that might help my career, I'd always go to the play. When my daughter gets a short story published, I'm much more excited than when I get a poem published.

I've learned to tolerate some loneliness living out here in the woods. I'd probably be happier living in town where things are more lively, but I've learned that I have to accept some isolation to gain the space to think and to write. I've learned that an artist and a scientist can have a good life together.

Lessons of life?

Commit yourself to your work and to your family and friends. Try to actually enjoy the too-brief time we all have here.

Source: Linda Pastan and Ken Adelman, "Word Perfect: For Linda Pastan, Revision Is the Purest Form of Love," in Washingtonian, Vol. 31, No. 8, May 1996, pp. 29-31.

Sources

Franklin, Benjamin, V, "Linda Pastan," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 5, American Poets since World War II, First Edition, edited by Donald J. Greiner, Gale Research, 1980, pp. 158-63.

McKee, Louis, Review of The Last Uncle, in Library Journal, Vol. 127, No. 2, February 1, 2002, p. 106.

"News Notes," in Poetry, Vol. 182, No. 3, June 2003, p. 181.

Pastan, Linda, "The Cossacks," in The Last Uncle, W. W. Norton, 2004, p. 15.

Paul, Jay S., "Linda Pastan: Overview," in Contemporary Poets, 6th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 1996.

Review of The Last Uncle, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 249, No. 3, January 21, 2002, p. 85.